Attenberg

If the extent of your Greek cinematic knowledge is limited to My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Mamma Mia you'd do well to widen your horizons at the MFA. They're unrolling the Festival Of Films From Greece an 11-day series of films hailing from one of the world's most conflicted nations. The festival opens tonight with Attenberg, Greece's submission for Best Foreign Film for the 2012 Academy Awards, and highlights include Pelican's Watch, a documentary about Europe's oldest vineyard, on the island of Santorini, and the farmers struggling to keep it up and running.

Is the NYFCC indulging in crass self-promotion by rushing to be the first critics society to present its 2011 awards. Are they, as some people such as blogger David Poland insist, a "business call. not a show call," putting their impact on the film industry (i.e., the Oscars) above their responsibility to disinterestedly weigh the merits of the year's movies? It doesn't matter: they're already underway.

He took his inspiration from Alfred Hitchcock by way of Jean-Paul Sartre and made ingeniously suspenseful movies that were all the more powerful because of their existential implications. That is especially true of The Wages of Fear (1953), the opening film for the Harvard Film Archive retrospective The Complete Henri-Georges Clouzot, which runs through December 18.

Before the tryptophan from your roast turkey does you in, you might want to top off your Thanksgiving Day by treating yourself to Labyrinth (1986), Muppeteer Jim Henson's unheralded gem in which a young Jennifer Connelly stars as a girl who must enter the surreal, Escher-like maze of the title, inhabited by some really big, ugly Muppets, to rescue her brother from the Goblin King, played by David Bowie having a bad hair day.

Sometimes it's hard to explain why something becomes a pop-cultural phenomenon. Like the chimerical heroes of Steve Barron's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), which - even before this movie and its three sequels - dominated the '80s as a comic book, Nintendo game, TV series, Pez dispenser, and so on.

It's been a dozen years since the last Muppet movie. But a new one will be opening in a couple of days, and you can prepare yourself by taking a look at the last one, Tim Hill's Muppets From Space (1999). Here's where Gonzo gets in touch with his long lost alien family by means of his breakfast cereal. Bad idea; the Feds kidnap him by à la E.

Called "the bad boy of Buddhism," Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche left a monastery in India in the '60s for the West where he smoked, drank, and caroused with women. He also helped transform the counterculture with his teachings and meditation techniques, inspiring such acolytes as Thomas Merton, Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell, and David Bowie.

Laurel Nakadate knows how to get a rise out of people. Her work explores the tyranny of the male gaze, but who exactly the victims are in her videos, photographs, installations, and films is debatable. In her second feature, The Wolf Knife (2010), a pair of teenaged girls go on a road trip from Florida to Tennessee in search of one's father.

As good as George Clooney is as beleaguered Hawaiian nabob and family man Matt King in Alexander Payne's "The Descendants," 20-year-old Shailene Woodley still steals the show as King's messed-up teenaged daughter Alexandra. Her subtle, funny, and vivid performance will probably catch the eye of critics groups and the Academy as the awards season approaches.

Illegal

Among Peter Greenaway's impenetrably beautiful and maddeningly symmetrical films, The Belly Of An Architect (1987) might be the most accessible. In it a rotund Brian Dennehy plays Stourley Kracklite (a name worthy of Edward Gorey), the designer of the title, who travels to Rome with his young wife (Chloe Webb) for an exhibition of his favorite architect, the visionary 18th century genius Étienne-Louis Boullée.

On Saturday, another terrific Boston Jewish Film Festival ends with a bang. Or maybe with a "Crash." The BJFF's final show, its "surprise screening," is Israeli director Alon Zingman's debut feature "Dusk," which shares the multi-story, interconnected structure of Paul Haggis's 2004 Oscar winner, and like that film even has an auto accident as a central event.